An International Analysis of Web-based Education and Strategic Recommendations for Future Development of Online Education
Morten Flate Paulsen
The NKI Internet College: www.nettskolen.com
E-mail: morten@nettskolen.com
Abstract
This paper presents an abstract of the 150 pages report: An International Analysis of Web-based Education and Strategic Recommendations for Future Development of Online Education. The report discusses global, institutional, and administrative issues of importance to online education. It further reports on advertising and financial issue, it analyzes pedagogical issues along with accreditation, assessment, enrollment, and progress flexibility. Future development and barriers to online education are discussed. Finally, strategic recommendations for politicians, educational administrators, and online educators are provided.
Introduction
This paper presents an international analysis of courses on the Internet, and it provides strategic recommendations about issues of importance to online education. The results and discussions are based on literature reviews, catalogue entries submitted by 130 institutions in 26 countries, and 72 interviews with key persons at these institutions. The catalogue data were collected from March 98 to February 99 and the interviews were conducted in the spring of 1999.
The research has been conducted within the CISAER (http://www.nettskolen.com/alle/in_english/cisaer) project which is supported by the European Leonardo da Vinci program. The project aims to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of course provision on the web with professional analysis, balanced evaluation and far-reaching recommendations which will provide the field of vocational education and training in the EU with a tool for dealing with this new training dimension.
Global Issues
The CISAER catalogue includes entries from institutions in all continents. In addition to four transnational institutions, the catalogue includes entries from institutions in 26 countries. It is likely that there is an overrepresentation of institution from countries that have English as an official language since the primary research language was English. Still, it would be quite easy to include many more entries from North America, since the listing from this area is intentionally partial. Among the 130 catalogue entries, 45.4% were from the English language countries: USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and Ireland.
The survey indicates that institutions in Europe (60.8%), North America (21.5%), and Australia with New Zealand (7.7%) overwhelmingly outnumbers institutions in South America (3.1%), Asia (3.1%), and Africa (0.8%). Even though the researchers have a better knowledge of Europe, North America, and Australia than they have of the rest of the world, the survey testifies that these continents overwhelmingly dominate web-based education.
There is a steady growth of institutions that offer online courses to students in other countries, and the analysis presents many examples of international collaboration and thinking. However, most of the global initiatives seem to be experiments and ambitions rather than main priorities.
Institutional Issues
A large number of the institutions offer quite few web courses. As many as 23.1% of the institutions report to have only one web-course, and 46.2% of them report to offer less than 5 courses. Only four institutions reported to have 100 courses or more. From this, one can infer that much of the activities are experimental and not pivotal for the institutions. The survey also showed that 29.3% of the institutions report that they have 100 or fewer students. Only four institutions reported to have more than 5000 students. The relatively low enrolment numbers also indicate that web-based instruction is not pivotal to these institutions.
One may conclude that there is a dominance of web-courses in the fields of computer and information sciences and by courses in education. Except from these two fields, web courses cover a very broad range of subjects. The number of subject areas that was offered varied considerably between the institutions. Nearly half of the institutions offer courses in only one category and only five offered courses in five or more categories.
None of the surveyed institutions seem to provide enough online courses and support services that this analysis would characterize them as virtual or online universities. The survey shows that 60.0% of the 130 institutions belong to the university and college sector, 10.0% to the traditional open university and distance education sector, and 9.2% were classified as companies or corporations.
Administrative Issues
An administrative system should be able to handle students, teachers, courses, and course material. An online college may have to handle thousands of students, hundreds of teachers, and a large number of courses with password restricted web pages, discussion forums, distribution lists, class rosters, and student presentations. It may also have to provide administrative systems for the dispatch of textbooks, handling of tuition and examination fees, and organization of local examinations. These services constitute a major challenge for many traditional institutions.
Institutions that plan to offer large scale and professional online education need an administrative system, which is integrated with the web. To accomplish this, institutions may follow several strategies. The simplest strategy is probably to collaborate with an institution that already has a functional administrative system. Another solution, which requires more technical competence, is to develop an in-house system based on common Internet services. The third option is to purchase a standard system for online education. These standard systems are continuously being improved, but they may still need much local adaptation. They may only meet some of the administrative needs, and they could place some pedagogical limitations on the courses.
A discouraging, but important observation is that a number of institutions do not use the web for administrative purposes. Outsourcing is an option that does not seem to be much used, only one instance was identified. Many of the institutions have developed in-house administrative solutions in combinations with standard Internet software. The standard administrative systems that were mentioned in the interviews were FirstClass, WebCT, and Lotus Notes.
Advertising and Financial Issues
It is implicit in many of the interviews that advertising of programs and courses is an important function of the web-services.
The tuition fees for web-courses seem to vary considerably among institutions and courses. Some courses are free and open to everyone, and others seem to have full or partial external funding. The institutions that operate with tuition fees seem to have fees that are the same or not very different from fees in traditional courses. The analysis has revealed few, if any, examples of institutions with substantial income from student fees. Likewise, there seem to be few institutions that can claim that provision of web-based courses has been an economic success, if they disregard external research and development grants.
Pedagogical Issues
The tutors seem to be both part-time teachers that are engaged just for the online courses and full-time teachers that also teach some online courses. It is also interesting to observe that distributed experts and students take part in the tutoring.
An analysis of the interviews indicates that the tutors at least conduct the following functions:
Human tutoring seems to be much more common than machine tutoring, but some institutions include machine tutoring in addition to human tutoring. Most institutions seem to combine individual tutoring with group tutoring. The focus between the two could however vary. Online teaching is in many courses supplemented with face-to-face meetings, video- or audio-conferences, or telephone contact.
Some institutions have course development teams; others use the tutor as the sole designer of a course. The different models probably have implications for both quality control and development time.
Accreditation
The interview analysis implies that accreditation of online courses and programs is very similar to the institutions' traditional accreditation schemes. Degrees, diplomas, certificates, and statements of completions are all widely used. The accreditation seems to be the same independent on whether the course or program is offered online or not. Many institutions basically state that the accreditation is the same as for campus courses.
Accreditation could be an important competitive advantage and several strategies could be followed to achieve the necessary accreditation. Collaboration with institutions in other countries could result in bilateral accreditation.
Assessment
While summative assessment of online courses seems to be very traditional and often has a face-to-face component, formative assessment is more experimental and based on online activities.
Most of the institutions apply several assessment methods in a course or program. Tutor assessment is the most common form of assessment found in the interviews. The interviews reveal many examples of self-assessment, but they imply that computer assessment is relatively scarce. However there are several examples of online quizzes, multiple choice tests, and some examples of interactive exercises. The interview analysis implies that peer assessment is relatively scarce. The interviews indicate that some courses have no assessment simply because they are self-study courses with no tutors.
Enrollment and Progress Flexibility
Both enrollment and progress can be more or less flexible. However, the two main models found in the interviews are group enrollment and progress and individual enrollment and progress. These models represent two different strategies that have important consequences for marketing, administrative systems, and pedagogical approaches.
The interviews testify that group based enrollment and progression is far more used than individual enrollment and progression. The analysis identified 46 institutions that used the group model and 12 that followed the individual model. In addition, 11 institutions offered both models.
The preponderance of the group model could come from conventional thinking that sustains the semester and term system in traditional educational systems. Another possible reason is that the institutions have a well-considered perception that teamwork and collaborative learning is hard to achieve with individual enrollment and progress. One can however argue that many students will prefer individual flexibility and that many institutions lack systems, structures, and competence on individual enrollment and progression. If so, one may hypothesize that open universities and distance teaching institutions should be more disposed of individual flexibility than traditional universities and colleges. However, the analysis has not found evidence to support this hypothesis.
Future Development
The interest in online education is high, and it seems to proliferate rapidly and globally. A Canadian competitive analysis (www.telelearn.ca/g_access/news/comp_analysis.pdf) shows that the primary expansion strategies are more and diverse programs, international students, and new and nice markets such as corporate training. The CISAER interviewees foresaw a future with more web-courses, additional online services, better quality of the courses, enhanced focus on teacher training, further collaborations with other institutions, and additional organizational consequences.
Barriers
There are a number of barriers that must be overcome before online education can become a large-scale success. Among them are financial barriers, resistance to change, bandwidth limitations, access limitations, insufficient search facilities, copyright issues, and barriers to online assessment.
The financial barriers are important. The analysis showed that few institutions had substantial income from student fees. At the same time, the cost of development and maintenance could be high. In addition, national regulations in some countries deny institutions the opportunity to charge tuition fees.
The interviews testify that there are a number of barriers to effective use of online assessment. Among them are public and institutional regulations, traditions for physical attendance, technical limitations, student identification, and detection of plagiarized digital material.
Strategic Recommendations
In conclusion, the report provides eight recommendations for politicians, educational administrators, and online educators: